The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  The silence that came after that was like the silence in the van as he’d driven away with his stuff that day, when she’d been a baby; full of space and floating dust motes and snapped timbers, something wrecked.

  Eighteen

  Coming through the glass doors at Domestic Arrivals, Sandy caught sight of her reflection and swept her hair casually back over her shoulder. It had been a tactical error, meeting up with Rich before they’d left, when she’d been so flustered and out of sorts. She’d hardly had a moment to think about her appearance then, but now she couldn’t believe how different she felt. How confident. The workshop had done that; had put her in touch again with her inner spirit — she could see it for herself. Her skin massaged with expensive cream, glowing after the body scrub, and her hair glossy with the intensive moisture treatment. Even Sophie was going to approve, she thought, of her Indian cotton blouse in the lovely shade of red she’d chosen. Paprika, they’d called it in the shop. And her linen pants were avocado. Everything edible and delicious. When he saw her this time, he’d look twice. He’d remember. And this time she’d be serene and radiant, focusing on Sophie but casually offering him a lift somewhere if he wanted. She was centred now, and in control. She waited in the arrivals lounge with an apple juice, watching people appearing and being greeted, the dismissive way some of them treated each other. As though they had no love to give.

  She checked the clock: 11.10 — they’d be coming through those doors any minute. She couldn’t wait to get her arms around Sophie. Now that Rich had met her, how could he not be envious of that bond between them? How could he fail to understand, now, that it was his absence that had actually created that shared, mutual closeness? He’d see how there was no room for him there, she thought, he’d see he’d forfeited that. And he wouldn’t be able to help but feel the aching, bitter regret he deserved.

  She swallowed. Checked the clock and went to the toilets and brushed her hair. Saw on the board that the flight had landed, and watched every face coming through the arrivals door, heading towards the luggage carousel. Then it was 11.35 and the screens over their heads changed and shifted to other flights and other concerns, and their flight marked landed kept slipping up the board until it disappeared, and she felt a shake start in her stomach and she couldn’t look anymore at people greeting each other with all that affection and complacency, all that offhand normalcy.

  Shaking, bone-chilling cold. She stood rooted to the spot. 12.10.

  The plane was in and that clock just kept shifting into new numbers, coolly oblivious, and the day unravelled in front of her. Just wound itself to breaking point and snapped like a string of beads, bouncing hopelessly in all directions. Sandy knew she would have to compose herself and act now, and it took the greatest effort of will to pull herself together to even contemplate doing it.

  To gather up these fragments from the white lino and blue-grey carpet of the airport floor, the orderly, rational parts of herself she needed to collect and account for.

  Police first, she thought, or ring Janet, or just wait for the next flight from Tasmania that evening, or find the number for the national park in Tasmania and ring the rangers there. The automated voice on Sophie’s phone saying the number you have called is turned off or out of range.

  She squeezed her hands together, wiped them down her new shirt and onto the textured linen of her pants. Impossible to clear the clamouring in her head, the voices that argued about what to do, and nobody to ask, nobody to take charge. She swayed through a dizzy spell and found a hard moulded seat, wiping the back of her hand against her sweaty forehead and smelling the cloying slick of citrus and apricot face cream.

  He has her was all she could think. He has her somewhere I can’t find her. Right this moment. Her mind seemed to lift out of gear and spin there, baffled and sick, feeling around the parameters of that appalling knowledge as if it was a dark box she’d found herself inside. She could not move forward, and break the spell. The clock showed more digital numbers and more flights shifted up on the board, and she sat watching her trembling right leg drumming the floor, going through the motions of movement. For the first time in seven days, she felt herself held like an insect in the sinuous, inexorable present.

  They’d gone back to packing up, a thick hateful silence between them, and Rich felt something in him change direction; something that had plummeted seemed to swoop and start climbing, as though he was on the end of a bungee rope, the elastic band holding him there by his ankle, secured with screws drilling directly into the bone. Temperature, that was it. He’d been cold, but now he was hot. Hard to assemble his thoughts into a clear sequence. He finished pulling on the boot, aware of a film of sweat on his neck and chest, and heat from the ankle rising like steam into his head. His awareness of it not muffled anymore — he was light-headed with it. Remembering with sudden needle-sharp clarity his mother’s kettle, an old-fashioned one that whistled, which she was forever hurrying to as it reached the boil, desperate to turn it off before anyone had to endure that rising shriek of noise.

  His foot was making that scream now, silently. A warning siren of seething, scalding pain. That’s what his mother must have found so unendurable too. He began to unzip his jacket, fumbling, as Sophie stood nearby, waiting impatiently, the expression in her face one of pure, unadulterated loathing.

  ‘Well,’ she said with heavy sarcasm, ‘I guess we missed our plane.’

  ‘You seriously think I orchestrated a storm just to piss off your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing,’ she replied, ‘but let’s get walking.’

  His leg was so stiff and he felt so dizzy that he found himself floundering to clamber up off the ground. She stood watching him for a few moments as he tried to lever himself up with his hands flat on the rock, the sore leg awkward and inflexible as something prosthetic. Then without a word she walked over and, with slow reluctance, put out her arm.

  Neither one of them said anything. He grasped her outstretched hand as she braced ready for him and then hauled himself up onto his feet, not looking at her. Steadying himself, humiliatingly, against the surprising muscle of her arm.

  Sandy steered and changed gears in the cotton-headed daze of a sleepwalker. She pressed the accelerator and indicated before turning, stolid as a zombie. Then she was on the freeway. At home, half an hour away now, was the number for the Parks and Wildlife ranger at Cradle Mountain, waiting on the phone table where she’d jotted it off Sophie’s notes. The ranger would answer and she could pass into his lap this terrible burning weight, alien and sinister as a meteorite, that smouldered now in her own. Then she was at the turn-off to take her home to Ayresville, past the road sign she’d always noted with such affection, the FORM ONE LANE amended, Ayresville-style, to FORM ONE PLANET, then negotiating her way through town automatically, glancing up at her house at the end of the street as she turned the final corner. This was going to be the worst part, going inside the empty house, but she could get to the phone, her lifeline, call the ranger, the local police, Annie and Margot and Rachel. Rich’s parents — maybe she should ring Rich’s parents, tell them what had happened. It kept coming to her in tiny gasping reminders, little stabs of panicked terror like something small and terrified in your hands, jerking and squirming.

  The front tyre hit the kerb hard as she pulled up. Phone, she thought desperately, inside to the phone. Maybe there was already a message. She opened the door to run, in her new flat leather shoes, across the grass, up to her house.

  Her house. There it was, but something instantly, baldly wrong with it.

  The blue gum in the front yard. Sophie’s tree.

  Blank bright sunlight was pouring onto the front garden, the beds were covered with — what? — woodchips, strewn thickly with them, and the very worst thing, in the middle, the tree gone.

  An amputated stump left, the last fifteen years lopped off slice by slice and every leaf and twig grown there disposed of, turned into nothing but leaf lit
ter, and debris. All pushed into the chipping machine, those whirling vicious blades rendering it all down.

  She stood with her hands on the dampness of the cut stump, breathing in hard sobs. Minutes were ticking away and she had to get inside and onto that telephone, but she couldn’t move. Seeing the tree’s base so deeply rooted there, tangled hard into the earth, and this trunk rising solidly, trustingly.

  Then chopped.

  Oh, the midwife lifting that placenta away, and her bleeding as it had torn from her, tissue from tissue. Seeing the cord, pale blue and shining, that had bound Sophie to her. She’d gone to speak but hadn’t, stunned. Hands had lifted it. Clamped it. The scissors opening and snapping shut, that noise as it was severed. As her daughter took a breath, shook with outrage, and howled. Small and terrified in someone’s gloved hands.

  Move.

  She caught sight of herself in the glass panel of the front door as she scrabbled for her keys, looking like she’d aged twenty years during the drive home, her new clothes crumpled like yesterday’s newspaper, mouth aghast with bolting fear.

  Phone the ranger, phone the police, phone her friends.

  You’re not going off the deep end, are you, Sandy? came Janet’s warning voice. You’re not totally overreacting here? Think before you jump to any ridiculous conclusions; don’t make a total fool of yourself. Her mother, who’d never put herself out to feel panic for her own children, who sat safe and snug in her own complacency, who she hated, really hated; her mother who had no deep end to go into, who was nothing but shallows all the way through. Her mother, who should have carried a sign warning you that you’d break your spine if you dared to put your trust in her, and jump.

  Sandy put her shoulder to the front door, which always jammed on its frame since she’d had that partial restumping done, and she should have had it seen to months ago, the whole house was a stuck-windowed, dodgy- floorboarded, tilting, decaying disaster, and she — she was a laughing stock, a failure, a fool. She was sobbing openly now as she kicked and pushed against the jammed door, her slippery new shoes, with their unworn soles, sliding against the porch timbers as she braced herself and put her shoulder to it, uselessly, again.

  Nineteen

  Ian Millard was on shift at Search and Rescue and took the call on the public dial-in line. It took him a while to calm the woman down and get a sense from her of whether she was next of kin, whether she’d called the ranger at the park first, who was missing and how long they’d actually been lost. When she said they were just a day overdue, he felt himself let a breath out and take the time to turn over a new sheet of paper, smooth it down. Get her back to procedure.

  ‘We’re not Parks and Wildlife,’ he said. ‘You haven’t called Parks and Wildlife — you’ve called the Tasmanian Police Service. We handle search and rescue operations.’

  She was meant to pick them up at the airport this morning, she was saying, going a mile a minute as he tried to write; they’d all agreed to be there, but they weren’t on the plane, and she’d rung the ranger and he was sending someone to check the logbook at the last hut, but what she wanted to know was when could they send out a search party and how could they find them with no mobile phone coverage?

  ‘Hang on,’ said Ian. ‘Just take it easy. It’s only been a day and there’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation. We had a lot of rain yesterday over the centre of the state; probably every walker on the track holed up somewhere to wait it out. They would have filled in their information when they registered and that’s what gets referred to in the event of a walker being reported overdue.’ The ranger, he knew, would have already explained this to her ‘That’s what I’m doing now,’ she said, voice cracking. ‘I’m reporting two walkers overdue.’

  ‘They’re going north to south?’

  ‘How would I know?’ she yelled. ‘I don’t know what the bastard had in mind.’

  He paused. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Her bloody father.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ian, putting down his pen. ‘Let’s go back a few steps.’

  Ian Millard had liked the interview he’d gone for with Search and Rescue, where they’d asked him, ‘So, do you have an outdoors background?’, and the next weekend he’d been out diving for abalone with them. He remembered his boss Geoff introducing him to Tim Redenbach, and Tim saying, ‘Have a guess what my nickname is’, and him answering, ‘Spider?’, and Tim laughing and saying, ‘Boys, you gave the right man the job.’

  He’d been with Parks and Wildlife for eight years and the police force for twelve, so it felt good, getting his land search and rescue qualifications and the ambulance paramedic training. Great crews. Great coordination. All twenty personnel involved last year in the search for that Swiss hiker in the same area, liaising with Parks and the State Emergency Service. They’d winched a dog in for that search, the winds wild over Mount Ossa, sleet driving sideways into Ian’s face as he waited on the ground to grab the dog, feeling its legs kick convulsively as it registered his arms, its clean warm smell. He’d felt something dip hollowly in his chest, a cold gulp of dread, when one of the searchers found the guy’s backpack left against a rock on the summit. That moment there, of unzipping the pack and seeing the guy’s extra sweater and his carefully folded raincoat inside, his diary and passport and Rough Guide, all of it had come back to Ian in bad moments ever since. That diary. A couple of blank postcards tucked in the pages, ready to be written on. Ian had crouched there feeling the temperature dropping and dropping, that hard painful tug in his throat, thinking that the walker was somewhere near, somewhere within a couple of kilometres in this gathering darkness, and the dog already up to its chest in crunching snow, floundering and crisscrossing its own tracks, as keyed-up and tightly wound as he was.

  He’d zipped up that backpack again, full of a young guy’s blind, immortal optimism, wondering what protective clothes he had on now, and whether they’d have to ring Switzerland.

  Ian had rescued quite a few people — out of caves, from kayaks pulled hastily out of flooded rivers, hanging on in the back of the chopper winching divers down to a holed boat — but what stayed with him, what dwelt on in him, was how utterly forlorn and useless that guy’s backpack on Mount Ossa had seemed, the chilled feeling he’d got. The weather had turned that time, so suddenly. That’s what worried him now.

  Something bad was happening to him, something weird. Sophie could see it and didn’t want to see it, the cranked-up, furious pace he was trying to set, like it was an endurance race and he was going to win whatever it took, the manic twitch she could see jumping in his jaw when he turned to check she was still following him as ordered. She hadn’t known what to think at first. For all she knew this was part of the plan too — not talking to her, paying her back.

  So she’d racked her brains for something to ask him.

  ‘What do you actually do in your job?’ she’d said. Just needing to hear him talk normally again, like he genuinely wanted to get them out of there.

  But then he’d started. Just one long stream of words, explaining every little technical thing to her, until she stopped listening because it became too confusing and tiring. He kept at it, even though he kept looking back and must have been able to tell she wasn’t paying attention anymore. She could have been anyone.

  ‘Then there’s the BCC Glow effect,’ he was shouting now, glancing back over his shoulder as if he expected her to be taking notes, or something. ‘It increases the picture’s chrominance, which means it takes the existing colours and blows them out to the edge of their spectrum. So red will be really red, orange will be really, really orange. I mean, totally over the top. The editor can go into the effect and there’s thirty different parameters they can manipulate, controlling how much of the picture glows, whether some colours glow more than others, all that.’

  She watched him, tramping doggedly over tussocks and jutting boulders with that freaky limp. Her stomach was tightening. Hurting. About an hour after they’d started walking,
he’d taken off his boot and started carrying it, making his way towards the next high plateau they could see, and somehow that was the scariest part, the way he swung that boot casually by its laces like an enemy’s head, and his filthy sock flapping as he wove around to avoid the sharp stony sections, trying to keep to the grassy patches.

  He’d had some bullshit theory about how they would be able to calculate which way to go next by the angle of the sun and looking for watercourses in the gullies below them that they would then be able to follow. He wouldn’t shut up, and she couldn’t make sense of it anymore. Just watched him jauntily waving that empty boot, hobbling along as if his leg was made of wood. Freakazoid zombie pirate.

  ‘But if the colours are too bright, the picture will break up on air, because the playback server’s chroma tolerance is exceeded,’ he panted, glancing back at her again, his eyes glittering. He looked like the lead singer of Dogland, only that guy did it for effect, he wore make-up to make himself look that hollow-eyed and intense, like he was really suffering. He wasn’t suffering, she thought dully. It was just another kind of karaoke.

  She felt the hot shuddering burn in her thighs, the sour, coppery taste of adrenaline as she scrambled after Rich. Her stomach scoured with nausea.

  He must have caught the look on her face.

  ‘Don’t worry, no need to be anxious,’ he sang with brittle cheerfulness. ‘Once we’re back on soft ground we’ll find a track again, or a cairn, or something. Leave it to me.’

  That cracked smile again; mouth askew, the eyes burning. ‘Leave it to me,’ he repeated. Nodding firmly to himself, as if that was going to reassure her.

  Sandy, head churning with scenarios, stood numbly at the sink. She had nothing to do, nothing to occupy her, nothing but the fragments going round in that swirl. Sophie somewhere with Rich. No phone message from her, so that ruled out just a delayed plane or a changed plan. Still somewhere out in the wilderness, unable to reach her. She had phoned the Tasmanian police and the ranger and the police station in her own town, and time was crawling now, stretching till it didn’t seem possible that the hands on the clock could still be moving.